> It has been suggested that SOIF be adopted. What is this SGML you are
> suggesting, and where can I find more information?
in the context that i know it, a SOIF object would contain possibly
multiple SGML-defined objects. for example an application-object could be
defined in a SOIF package where an SGML DTD was there followed by content.
this is like creating and sending applets on the level of software
specification rather than code.
SOIF could contain lots of things. i believe SOIF contains either MIME
objects or otherwise SGML-defined types. i havent seen a SOIF definition
yet. not quite there yet... anyone know where it lives?
SGML is a bit of an overkill for any one application. it's nice when you
may write more than one application in your life, or when you need to
communicate with other people's applications. if your program loads a
definition of its protocol or content-classes then you gain by not having
to hard code the definition, by having a clean form of the definition for
testing or correctness testing, and by being readily capable of
communicating that definition with other developers working in the same
domain, robots or whatever.
for example, if you want your bot to know HTML, might as well incorporate
an SGML parser to pick up the HTML DTD, rather than hack and rehack each
new version of HTML.
the general form is having multiple parsers in an application.
see <http://www.sgmlopen.org/> and <http://www.sgmlsource.com/>
also <http://www.ornl.gov/sgml> and <http://www.sil.org>
also look at HyTime, eg, "Quick Guide To HyTime Basics," on
<http://www.sil.org/sgml/gen-apps.html#hytime>
by the way, anyone looking for persistent storage in an
objectbase-kinda-context may want to look into SBENTO, another ISO treat.
-john